


of was and when

by justdoityoufucker



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Romantic Interest Implied, What's a family if not the Quartermaster and his 00's
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23936698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justdoityoufucker/pseuds/justdoityoufucker
Summary: He assumed at some point he had passed out, once 003 was safe and R had let him know that 008 and 009 were well on their way to Dubai and South Africa, respectively, and those things had happened around five in the morning and—once he got the glasses back onto his face the myriad of screens told him it was almost seven.
Relationships: Eve Moneypenny & Q, James Bond & Q, James Bond/Q, Q & 00 Agent(s) (James Bond)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 123





	of was and when

“Fuck,” her voice was tinny, and of course she had to been in the only skyscraper in New York that didn’t have half a dozen security cams in every hall. Bloody Americans and their peculiarities. But 003, like her fellows, was more focused on trying to find someone to shoot. “Fourteenth? Why the hell is his office on the fourteenth goddamn floor?”

“Focus,” Q said absently, tapping through the building’s security system. Good, cams installed in on the fourteenth so he’d at least know where to direct her. His office door opened but he paid it no mind. “You’ve only one floor to go, it’s not as if you’ve never gone up stairs before.”

“Please climb all the stairs in Vauxhall and get the fuck back to me on that statement,” she snarled, but there was no hitching in her breath and no real heat under the adrenaline. Q quietly considered it a win.

The office was easy enough to find, and 003 chuckled darkly when she had to pull her lock picks out to get in. After that all she needed to do was connect the main computer to power with the cable Q sent with her, and he’d have access to the files that they needed.

She continued humming as Q worked, pressing any buttons he needed pressed and generally being at least a little helpful.

More than he could say for several of the other agents he’s had the pleasure of working with.

“Aw, shite, the alarm’s off,” she said when Q was still in the middle of it, and distantly he could hear the bells ringing through her wire. “Done yet, Q?”

“A moment,” he made sure there were copies of the files on his external thumb drive, unplugged it, and left the computer through the back door he’d entered from. “Right, done, get the cable and get out.”

“Cutting it a bit close, _Quartermaster_ ,” she grumbled, looped the cord around one wrist (or what he supposed was a wrist, the cam feed was dark and blurry) before heading back to the stairwell. “They coming for the elevators or…?”

“They’re heading to the elevators.” At least there were cameras in the elevators, he supposed, “The fire escape is still open.”

“Right, I’m down, Q, next flight out?” she returned after a few minutes of nothing but the rather loud fall of her boots and the clattering of the fire escape.

“Ticket is already sent,” he unplugged the hard drive, which was promptly plucked from his hand. To say he shrieked would be an overstatement, but he at least _squeaked_.

“Gods, warn me next time you do that,” 003 swore, and her breathing picked up and her voice was a little concerned when she continued, and Q didn’t have time to waste looking or yelling at whoever grabbed the drive because she ground out, “Contact! Fuck, Q, get me a route out!” There was the familiar litter of gunfire, and Q called up a map of New York City and did his damndest, despite the raging headache, to get her to the airport safely.

-

He assumed at some point he had passed out, once 003 was safe and R had let him know that 008 and 009 were well on their way to Dubai and South Africa, respectively, and those things had happened around five in the morning and—once he got the glasses back onto his face the myriad of screens told him it was almost seven.

It was almost seven and 004 was in stalking down the stairs to the main body of Q Division, looking to the world like a woman ready to shoot someone.

He had her kit—of course he had her kit ready—and once she had it she was off to Switzerland or somewhere like that. Q only really had brains enough for three double-oh’s at a time, and 004 always stretched it as it was.

Not as much as his personal hellion, 007, but enough for it to tap back into the headache that had gone with the nap.

R appeared at eight, by which time Q supposed he was supposed to be gone, if only from the disapproving twitch at the corner of the woman’s eye. “M’ll be down in half an hour,” she said, as soon as she scooped Q’s files away from him, saved the work he had been doing on the three screens in front of him, and pushed him off his stool. “And if he sees you here it’ll be mandatory leave and a Psych eval. Do us all a favor and go home, mm?”

Maybe it was the fact that she used that voice with her twin toddlers, but something in her tone brooked absolutely no argument.

Q floated through packing up his things—even the tablet, though R almost growled, he needed to work on the schematics on it—and was out before the rest of the division even realized that he had been there all night. There was some mild panic, though, when he was on the Underground and halfway to the house and he couldn’t remember if he gave the hard drive to M. He vaguely, ever vaguely, remembered someone taking it from him. The mere fact that he was alive meant they were friendly, but, just in case, he shot off a text to Eve.

She called while he was letting himself in, but he didn’t want to linger on the stoop because Madeleine was shrieking for food, and Geneviève was nowhere to be found.

Once there was food in their matching ceramic bowls, Q divested his bag to the table, his coat to the closet, and his shoes in front of the door. He needed food, and he knew he needed food, but he was also _very_ tired. The only thing that dragged Q away from the thought of his bed was his phone, beeping with a voicemail from Eve, and the quiet _mrp mrp mrp_ that meant Geneviève was getting into trouble.

She hadn’t eaten at all, but was standing with her front paws against the window in the kitchen and her rear legs in the sink, battering the glass and _mrp_ -ing at the birds outside.

Q left the ragdoll to it, dug some worse-for-wear leftovers out of the fridge and listened to his voicemail while eating.

“Damn, I just missed you after R made you leave,” was the first thing Eve said, and Q couldn’t help the smile. “Bond dropped by last night with the drive, M assumed you gave it to him. I’m chalking this up to you having not slept, yes? Mallory wants you back tomorrow morning, but if there’s an emergency I’m sure you’ll be here.”

-

The cats made a unanimous decision to nest around his head sometime in the early afternoon, but Q, being asleep, did nothing about it until he was awoken by his phone. And the alarm he had wired into his clock that only ran when there were problems in Q Branch or an emergency with someone or something in the field.

He guessed it was the latter as Eve was the one on the phone, not R, and Q did his best to pay attention in between feeding the cats again and pulling on clean clothes.

“Christ!” was the first thing out of her mouth that really caught his attention, “Tanner’s sending a car over to collect you, thank god he’s here because Mallory is yelling at MI5 for not catching this. It’s not technically our jurisdiction but—”

“But there’s a terrorist from Surrey threatening to release classified files from MI5, yes,” he tugged his coat on, swiped the tablet from the table it had been abandoned on, and remained with one eye looking for the car. The cats sat, side by side with their heads cocked and unnervingly blue eyes balefully watching him. “How’s R doing?”

“Monitoring, for now,” Eve was typing something and someone was yelling for her as the car pulled up, “Fuck! Listen, I’ll be in your office when you get here. Stay safe.”

He murmured the same to her as they both hung up, and went out to the car.

-

It was not only Eve in his office, but half of his own staff and M with Tanner trailing him like a puppy. R was giving the room as a whole her best stinkeye, but she looked relieved as soon as her eyes landed on Q.

“Oh, thank god,” she breathed, picked up the laptop— _Q’s_ laptop that she had been typing at—turned it around and pointed at the screen, “whoever it was, they left a trail. We haven’t started tracking yet, I wanted to wait until you saw this.”

“MI5?” Q asks of Mallory, mostly just curious as he begins searching through code.

There’s a bit of disgust in M’s voice when he says, “Their system is shut down and will be shut down until this is dealt with. Their Q will be in contact as soon as this is figured.”

Q nodded, focused down. There was a bit of a trail, as R had said, and she took over the tracing with a couple of the staff. M loomed, and generally tried to look intimidating or something.

Once he was at the computer, it was easy enough to dig back, find how the hacker got into their system—the backdoors between MI5 and MI6 were linked, and however the person had gotten in to MI5 had simply allowed them to piggyback into MI6’s servers. Once he had a lock on what they were doing, nothing dangerous, he pushed up his glasses, asked, “Trace?”

“Almost done,” R remained hunched over the computer, tapping the keyboard while the larger screens triangulated. It _was_ Surrey.

M was yelling for agents, and Tanner had a line to MI5 and the instant that they located the computer that was being used to hack into their servers there were two carfuls of their people within ten kilometers of the house. Q waited until they were closer to five kilometers out, then booted the hacker’s access. They couldn’t shut down, as MI5 had, because there were still three agents in the field, but that was what his underlings were for.

There were stricter protocols running by the time Q let Eve drag him away from his desk, and R had a team combing their code to ensure that nothing was left, and there were no ways for anyone to get in. She fed him, or more aptly dragged him to the cafeteria and glared at him until he ate something, then released him back to his division.

He’d found a cup of tea by the time the cars of agents returned, or maybe a cup of tea had found him. Either way, he was on his stool, watching R work and occasionally answering questions that came up, watching the little dots that were MI5 and -6 agents making their way back to Vauxhall.

And there wasn’t long to wait, because within ten minutes of arrival, 007 appeared with a case, followed by a very twitchy looking 006 and Tanner.

“M’s coming, he’s finishing up with MI5,” Tanner said as Bond handed the case over.

Q opened it, slid out the laptop and phone that were inside. They had more failsafes in place so there wouldn’t be a repeat of Silva, but Q was still a little leery as he plugged in the proper cables and let the computer start up. The phone, irritatingly, had no memory chip and was at a five percent battery. He set it aside.

“Don’t you two have buildings to blow up or people to assassinate?” Q distractedly asked both of the double-oh’s. Whoever’s computer it was, they had done a rather shabby job of trying to conceal what they had done. He didn’t hear what the two agents might’ve said back, though, because something about the computer was wrong. “Were there any external drives found?”

“No,” came M’s voice from the area of the stairwell, and he was followed by a rather exhausted looking Moneypenny, “Though MI5 is sweeping the house and the rest of the neighborhood again, but they haven’t found anything or anyone so far. We’re to be notified if they do. Please tell me you’ve found something.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” he looked over the laptop at his superior, “there are signs that a lot of the personnel files were exported to an exterior drive. And the phone is missing its memory card.”

-

Q was practically balls deep in MI5’s firewalls the next morning when a cup of steaming tea and a bag of take-away Chinese were set on his desk. “Compliments of Miss Moneypenny,” came 007’s drawl, the man himself settling on one of the extra stools that that had appeared sometime over the past twelve hours. “She said you’ve been down here since last night.”

“Mm?” Q paused his sifting and coding, checked the clock on the wall. 7:30. And he’d actually expected to get some sleep the night before. That earned a sigh. “What brings you to Q Division, 007?”

“Mallory mentioned you had a kit ready for me.”

“Ah, Guatemala,” Q was surprised to find that he did remember.

-

Bond was gone for two days without incident, which was a slightly better score than 004, who had caused trouble almost immediately after setting foot in the Swiss Alps.

Moneypenny didn’t divulge, and Q didn’t ask.

He was more than busy with MI5 and his own firewalls, and he was having a feud with Moneypenny, anyway.

-

Moneypenny knew way too much about everything in Vauxhall, from the basements and bunkers of Q Division to the upper bureaucratic offices. It was for good purpose, though, since she reported directly to M and generally needed to know everything, but it still unnerved Q when she knew about the goings-on of his own division before they were officially reported. Case in point: the pens.

It was a point of contention, the pens. Annoyingly, in Q’s own opinion, because as soon as they had stopped letting the double-oh’s take exploding pens the agents had complained and pleaded to have their pens back.

Boothroyd, before his retirement and death, had been working several prototype pens—the originals had a nasty habit of arming at the slightest jostle, and it wouldn’t do for an agent of MI6 to lose an arm because of an accidental pen explosion. Thankfully there had been no casualties, but the agents (all of them, but his double-oh’s in particular) still seemed to expect pens.

And Eve was doing a rubbish job of telling them that that wasn’t happening.

Just because she knew that they had been going through Boothroyd’s prototypes did _not_ mean any of them were okayed for the field, and _definitely_ did not mean that the pens would be coming back. He’d had to deal with 003 and 004 before R happened to mention that she had told Eve about the prototypes, and that ended in a call from the woman herself and a promise to take Q out for dinner as some sort of apology.

That’s how they ended up outside of a chip van in Bishop’s, sharing an umbrella, and gossiping about the less classified aspects of work.

Q _liked_ Moneypenny. She was no-nonsense and efficient, but didn’t get so involved in work that she was like that all the time. She was fun to be around, particularly if it didn’t involve work.

Though, not, he darkly realized as she looped an arm through his and dragged him toward her apartment, when it involved talking about his least favorite people in SIS, namely his counterpart in MI5 and, of course, 007. “I don’t know how he does it,” she was saying as she handed Q the umbrella and dug out her keys, “But he managed to down three buildings in Guatemala yesterday. I don’t know what M is going to use as a cover for that.”

Q found himself snorting at that. M always bitched about it, but he always did as his predecessor had and covered for his agents.

“So!” Eve let them in, cracked her knuckles and toed her pumps off, “You ready to get your ass kicked at Smash?”

-

He made it home before the buses stopped running, fed the cats, and felt awake enough to tackle some personal coding before the need to sleep hit him. Rather like a sledgehammer, in that manner.

The next day flew by, because he was once again so busy he barely had room to breathe, let alone get all the work that needed doing _done_. Alec returned in the early afternoon, his rifle in one piece but the scope broken, and all of his other gear lost. Q counted it as a win that he actually picked up the hard drives they needed, though, and after him came 004, looking worse for wear but grinning as she lobbed her full kit, cleaned and in order, into the return bin Q kept out for them.

“The Alps were _lovely_ dear Quartermaster,” she all but purred as she slid into the extra stool, “next time you should visit as well.”

“I would agree, but I’m not so fond of snow,” he returned, handing her the mug she usually kept and directing her to the fresh pot of coffee that one of the underlings had started. All of the double-oh’s had taken to keeping an extra mug on his desk. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about.

“Oh?” she raised an eyebrow, slid off and slinked through the desks and back with a steaming cup, leaving a trail of confused and sighing boffins behind her, “But I would think—” she paused, cocked her head, and smiled almost viciously at him—“but of course, it doesn’t matter. Thank you for the coffee, dear Quartermaster.”

He hesitantly nodded, and turned back to his work as she headed up the stairs.

-

The double-oh’s continued to be confusing for the next three days, which were made worse because Q, to his own abject horror, was going to be on leave for his cousin’s wedding. Two days, more than enough time for MI6 to spontaneously immolate itself, but with MI5 back in the game he’s a little less leery to leave. He might not have the highest opinion of their sister organization, but their Quartermaster had also been trained by Boothroyd, so it was better than nothing.

And it would have to be. Q had his mobile and an extra couple of burners in case M or the division needed him, but as soon as he’d gotten his Tesla out of storage and hit the M1, he was disconnected. It was almost a relief to not have to worry about work, but there was the looming threat of coming back to disaster that wouldn’t leave his mind.

The wedding was to be at a lovely half-timbered house on the outskirts of Stratford, and Q was pleased to find that he was not late, and nobody was drunk.

At that point, anyway.

Given his job and his eminent dislike of social interactions, Rose had not insisted that he be part of the wedding party, but as soon as he stepped foot in the building she had one arm wrapped around one of his own arms, signing rapidfire almost too quickly for Q to follow. The general gist was that she had missed him, he guessed, and that he had in turn missed her mother getting drunk and breaking a wrist the night before, and the stag parties had been incredible.

She dragged him all the way through the house, up the stairs to the third floor, dropped his bags outside of a closed door, and continued on to a very large bedroom connected to a parlor and a balcony. Michele, her fiancée, was laying on the floor, a full stemless glass of wine on her stomach.

Q could already tell how the wedding was going to go.

-

And, unsurprisingly, the wedding went as expected—two members of the wedding party were extremely hungover, Rose cried the entire time she signed out her vows and Michele signed hers back, and the reception largely consisted of a lot of champagne and wine, and a mountain of rose and almond meringues.

For the most part, Q just tried to blend in, and rather succeeded. His aunts didn’t recognize him since they hadn’t seen him in literal years, since his parents’ funerals before he’d entered university. He had, in fact, forgotten completely about work because of the pleasant atmosphere until his phone, which he had left in his inner jacket pocket just in case, buzzed at him, and he ducked outside to take a call from Moneypenny.

Goodbyes were brief and forceful. Rose didn’t try to ask, and that put Michele off as well, but they both gave him rib-cracking hugs and sent him on his way with a box of meringues and two bottles of champagne.

-

It was a two hour drive from the bed and breakfast back to the center of London, not accounting for the traffic that would be out. Though, given that it was relatively late in the evening, there weren’t as many people out and about as could be.

Perhaps it was the rain, Q mused, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel of his Tesla, and going maybe a bit faster than was legal.

The rain had turned to sleet by the time he made his way into the bunker. The Q Division was bare-bones-staffed at all times, but it looked particularly thin when he made it in, charcoal suit surprisingly nice looking despite the time in the car. R was not present, which was a small sigh of relief, but M was lurking at his desk with perhaps too much interest in some of the prototypes there as he waited.

“Why the call? Eve didn’t tell me anything,” was the first thing Q asked after his bag was down and a mug of tea was in his hand.

“We aren’t exactly sure, yet,” M explains with a modicum of hesitancy behind the words. “005 ran into something in Germany that led back to Surrey. The information on MI5.” He saw the utter confusion wrinkling Q’s face and explained further, “There was a computer found that had the encrypted information on it. They hadn’t decrypted it yet, but—”

“It had been sent on to someone else,” Tanner finished, walking up with a laptop under his arm that he thrust toward Q, and he addressed both of them, but mostly just M. “005 just got back, he’s headed to medical for his leg then he’ll be down here.”

“And I am very sorry that we interrupted your leave,” M said, and he sounded genuinely sincere at that. “One of the twins had a medical emergency, so we couldn’t call R in.”

“She would set the building on fire,” Q muttered, turning the laptop on, “nothing found with the computer?”

M deferred to Tanner, who shook his head, “He swept the whole apartment, couldn’t find anything. And his mark was already dead, so it was too late for questions.”

“Hm,” Q took a sip of tea, held it in his mouth as it cooled, and finally said, “Well, if it was sent somewhere, then we can surely find where it was sent.”

-

Two hours and a visit from 005 later, Q sort of regretted his words. It was hard to track the transmissions of a half-broken computer, especially when the computer had originally been operating in German. He didn’t understand German.

But it was sort of a boon that 005 was there in that case because, despite how close he insisted on standing next to Q’s person, his first language was German.

Plus, the man was specialized in hand-to-hand combat, so Q didn’t even want to try telling him to move.

And it wasn’t as if he needed to be there long. With help translating, it was only another hour or so before Q had a set of coordinates that M was sending both 005 and 004 to. Q felt a flash of pity for each of them at having to be in close quarters with the other, then got to work crippling the network that was holding the encrypted files.

It was an artful process, and anyone with even an introduction to computers would be able to see it in how he fucked over their internet connection, booted all of the connected servers and made it impossible for them to be able to connect to the internet again. All without leaving a trail.

Boothroyd would’ve wept.

-

They landed all right and managed to make it into the middle of Vancouver without murdering anyone, which Q counted as a plus. Whoever the people on the other end were, they were attempting to get their systems back up and running, but considering that there was no way he could peek in to their base, he couldn’t tell if it was the same people.

Which was…problematic. He didn’t let it stop him, though.

Once 005 and 004 were there and quickly approaching the house under the coordinates, Q had no qualms in nudging the systems in the house to complete failure.

And if 004 snarled something in his ear when somebody ran out of the house (he could see it all on satellite), he politely ignored it and let her get on with running the man down.

-

There was a break from 005 and 004 the next day, which was sort of a relief because there’s only so many times you could tell two trained killers that they need to go _right,_ not left, without wanting purposefully lead them into an ambush. They had uncovered a whole ring of people that they were now hunting down, and it was with a sore back, fuzzy vision and an almost painful shit-eating grin that Q handed them off to R.

He didn’t stick around to hear her muttered curses, but went to get his car and go home for at least a few hours’ sleep.

The cats had not barfed anywhere, which was a relief, and after topping off their food dishes (Eve had stopped by to feed them the day before) he all but collapsed.

-

For one of the few times in his so-far short career at MI6, Q got a full night of sleep, actually ate breakfast, and was stepping into Vauxhall as the hour turned eight. Everything seemed rather calm, and R was getting off as he made himself tea.

“Right, double-oh’s four and five should be fine, they have a line with M right now and they shouldn’t need our help,” R rattled off, looking quite tired as she filled her travel mug with fresh coffee, “oh, and Tanner stopped by to see how 007 was doing, he might be back.”

-

007 seemed to always dog his steps, because no sooner was he behind his desk, schedule and tea in hand, when Tanner appeared looking nervous.

“Laurie’s been having problems maneuvering him,” the man said, handing over a dossier, “Los Angeles.”

“Okay,” Q goes right into the feeds, only giving the dossier a cursory glance. Bloody 007.

-

Hours later he was still babying Bond’s feeds, only ever popping in to say something when directions were needed or the man said something that was particularly stupid. Other than that he was getting a nice amount of coding done, finishing up the new firewalls for MI5 and making damned sure they were as near impenetrable as he could get them.

“You know,” Bond said, out of the blue, in a very casually mild voice, “I’ve always wanted to lodge a man’s head on a spike. Like a trophy, yes?” He sounded mostly like he was talking to himself but that was too disturbing for Q to let remain.

“No?” he said, feeling rather mystified, “007, if you must bring trophies, please let those trophies not be any body parts, nor anything that might be leaking fluids. I work with delicate technology.”

“Hm, well,” despite shimmying on a ledge almost a kilometer above a very busy Los Angeles rush hour, the man didn’t even sound ruffled, “that certainly puts a damper on my plans, Q.”

Q considered that but didn’t comment on it, merely said, “It should be the window right ahead of you.”

-

The business with MI5’s data and the hacking ring was well over by the time Q came in two days later to find 004 and 005’s kits in the bin, a cup of tea waiting for him on his desk, and a packet of pastries that Amelia handed to him, “Courtesy of R, she thinks she can bribe you.”

“Bribe me?” Q wouldn’t say no to that, though it depended on what she bought him. He opened the bag when Amelia snorts.

“Something about getting next Friday night off,” she pointed to the larger screen behind them, where a line of R’s baby blue sticky notes were meandering across the bottom of the screen. “I suppose she went into more detail there, she must’ve spent a whole bloody hour on them.”

“Right,” Q said, smiling. Chocolate glazed doughnuts with sprinkles. He would most likely accept the bribery, even if it was bad form. “Next time, please tell her to just ask me.”

“Well, I told her,” Amelia shrugged, and made off with a yell of, “See you all tonight!”

There was a very lackluster groaning in response.

-

He was two doughnuts into the bag and had a second cup of tea brought to him by a very apologetic 008 for not returning his gun (or rather, his gear in general) in one piece, when Tanner popped in, once again looking nervous.

“Sorry Q, trouble again,” he tapped the desk a couple of times, a tic, jerked his head in the general direction of ‘upstairs.’

-

He got 003 out of the locked room she was in and directed her down a series of frankly labyrinthine hallways to a series of rooms where, he assumed, she would shoot people and pick up important documents, though not necessarily in that order. After, M sent him back down to his Division and there were prototypes to sign off on, kits to prepare, and other agents to monitor. 007 would be back, as would 002, and Alec would once again be heading out to the wastes of Russia. Q was not sad to see him off.

By the time he had a minute to make himself more tea (not caffeinated, not when he would be leaving in two hours) and return to the doughnuts, he found 007 and 007’s broken gun waiting for him in his office.

“You know, it isn’t a contest to see if you can break it every time,” Q said with only the subtle hint of a sigh. He set his half-stale doughnuts and his tea on his desk, away from the other man, and took the separated barrel and stock in hand.

“Come now, Q, where’s your sense of fun?” Bond looked much too like a cat with a mouse cornered for anything good to be following that, so Q decided that he would probably just be better off accepting his fate.

007 held out one hand, white tissue paper peeking out from his fingers, and Q hesitantly accepted the rather small package. He unrolled the paper, and in his palm was a little clay cat wearing a sweater emblazoned with the initials L.A.

-

Knickknacks, all over his desk. R called them tchotchkes and M looked like he was going to laugh every time he came down into Q Division and saw the tiny cat sculptures that were beginning to end up on all of the other desks as well. Bond had taken Q’s word to heart, in his own very peculiar way, and once he had started bringing back souvenirs for Q, well.

004 managed to find the most delicate ceramic cats to send, no matter what part of the world she was in. Alec sent or brought cats with a glaring fire theme, including one whose head opened and whose body was full of matches. Q had confiscated the matches.

003 and 005 were trying to one-up each other with sheer ugliness and bad craftsmanship, and he probably liked theirs the most, but for the fact that 008 kept finding little maneki neko to leave behind.

Eve was down one evening, waiting for Q to finish up and admiring the new residents of Q Division when she suddenly said, “It’s you.”

“Hm?” Q was in the middle of finishing 002’s kit and didn’t have many brain cells to spare for considering Eve’s proclivity for mystery.

“It’s you,” she swept an arm around to indicate all of the cats, “you inspire insanity in our very best, Q.”

He managed a very pointed look.

“Well, I’m not taking that back,” she set down the solid gold (or at least gold plated) cat she was holding, bodily dragged Q away from the now-closed case.

-

“But you know,” she said when they had picked up curry and were caught in a stare down over whether to watch a movie or play the horror that was Lego Star Wars, “It’s okay that you’ve corrupted the double-oh’s.”

“Why is that?” Q asked, feeling very exasperated with the whole topic.

“Because if we tried to get rid of you at least three of them would go rogue,” Eve explained, speeding over to the telly to pop in Mad Max while Q puzzled that out.

“I think,” he said, “that’s one of the most comforting things I’ve ever been told in my life.”

**Author's Note:**

> think i posted this at some point but took it down anyway have it again  
> twitter is @shortgoblin


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